Wilhelm Worringer was a German art historian. He is known in connection with expressionism

Expressionism

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...

. Through his influence on T. E. Hulme

T. E. Hulme

Thomas Ernest Hulme was an English critic and poet who, through his writings on art, literature and politics, had a notable influence upon modernism.-Early life:...

 his ideas had an effect on early British modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

, especially vorticism

Vorticism

Vorticism, an offshoot of Cubism, was a short-lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th century. It was based in London but international in make-up and ambition.-Origins:...

.

His best-known work is Abstraction and Empathy, his doctoral thesis. In it he argued that there were two main kinds of art: art of "abstraction" (which was associated with a more 'primitive' world view) and art of "empathy" (which was associated with realism

Realism (arts)

Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

 in the broadest sense of the word, and applied to European art since the Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

).

Worringer was influential because he saw abstract art

Abstract art

Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...

 (for example, Islamic art

Islamic art

Islamic art encompasses the visual arts produced from the 7th century onwards by people who lived within the territory that was inhabited by or ruled by culturally Islamic populations...

) as being in no way inferior to "realist" art, and worthy of respect in its own right. This was critical justification for the increased use of abstraction in pre-war European art. Worringer coined the term Expressionism

Expressionism

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...

. He taught at the University of Bonn

University of Bonn

The University of Bonn is a public research university located in Bonn, Germany. Founded in its present form in 1818, as the linear successor of earlier academic institutions, the University of Bonn is today one of the leading universities in Germany. The University of Bonn offers a large number...

, where Heinrich Lützeler

Heinrich Lützeler

Heinrich Lützeler was a German philosopher, art historian, and literary scholar. He presided over a number of institutes and was dean at the department of philosophy at the University of Bonn.-Biography:...

 was one of his students.

He posited a direct relationship between the perception of art and the individual. His claim that "We sense ourselves in the forms of a work of art" led to a formula, "The aesthetic sense is an objectivized sense of the self." He also stated, "Just as the desire for empathy as the basis for aesthetic experience finds satisfaction in organic beauty, so the desire for abstraction finds its beauty in the life-renouncing inorganic, in the crystalline, in a word, in all abstract regularity and necessity."

His work was widely discussed and influenced Klee amongst others. He is credited by philosopher Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...

 in A Thousand Plateaus

A Thousand Plateaus

A Thousand Plateaus is the second book of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the first being Anti-Oedipus. Written by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it was translated into English by Brian Massumi...

as being the first person to see abstraction 'as the very beginning of art or the first expression of an artistic will.

At the time his Egyptian Art was published by G.P. Putnam's Sons Ltd, the Sphinx of Gizeh had been recently restored.

Works

• Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1907)
• Formprobleme der Gotik (1911)
• Egypyian Art (1928)